Summary: In the aftermath of the Miltian Conflict, Virgil works with his addiction. Rated M for adult language and themes.

Purgatory

After Miltia, nothing changes. In the wake of the clusterfuck with the Zohar, no one asks about the Realian-precise stitching holding his guts together, just like no one asks him why the even lines are marred by bite marks and bloody scratches from the neck down. The military takes its sweet time saying a whole lot of diplomatic bullshit, some line like, "Federation air drop a success; however, a U-TIC-engineered weapon of mass destruction caused untold carnage when used against the civilian population of Miltia." It's all pointless, of course, and the leaked news footage of the URTV's going batshit, the footage the Fed doesn't want people to see, is squashed the moment some intrepid reporter hands over the video feed. But it's all over the UMN – viral – so there's nothing anyone can do about it. Just like a lot of things.

In the end, the Federation-wide embargo maybe helps him – not deal, really, but more like begin to tolerate the persistent maddening beating against his chest. The government's reasoning is sound, even if their excuses aren't: it's not so much that "the unstable economy of the Federation's planets in the aftermath of recent events necessitates immediate action with the suspension of all luxury items", it's more along the lines of "we're not sure what the hell happened on Miltia and we can't take the risk that the rest of the Realians will rip us apart and eat us alive while we sleep". When he dreams, he sees half-assembled Realians laying on tables with their metallic innards exposed, like some psychopath's playthings. He doesn't look into their faces, because he knows that every one will look like –

On his bad nights, the ones that happen more and more as he considers actually talking to the doctors, the Realians aren't so much disassembled as cannibalized, copper-bright plasma dripping from mouths filled with perfectly even white teeth, defenseless as the extinct sharks he had a test on in Biology in Old Jerusalem, HIS2001. He's able to scream himself awake before he sees the face attached to the bloodied gray dress, but it doesn't really help.

Weeks pass. The sterile rooms of the Fed med-bay are covered in cheerful pictures. He closes his eyes just to be away from them, but even then the mindless cries and one-sided conversations of the crazies next to him make it impossible to relax. They lump everyone from that last evacuation lift into the same hospital unit – like a kindness, or the triage system. "Those most likely to be fucking crazy", he thinks he saw a medic whisper to a nurse. And they're not wrong – the ward is soundproofed for a reason. But he still doesn't know why he's here, because he's not crazy. Just – fucked up.

The weeks roll into months like a hull breach and he spends the days not thinking. He mainly just goes through the routine rifle assembly, the kind that they drilled into his skull as soon as he showed up to infantry training. The others avoid him as much as they seem to be able to. He's not on suicide watch, at least not like the rest of them, and the medics murmur over him that it's his unresponsiveness to the whole situation that's curious, like he's a damn toy or puppet. They all have the same look as a boyfriend waiting to see if he knocked up his girl – apprehensive and guilty around the eyes. He considers telling them he's not going to explode, or throw a shit-fit or something, but it's not worth the effort. The army keeps sending the check to his mother every month, so it's all fine.

His mom sends two letters and then he doesn't get any more because after the second they deny him the "privilege", they say. Like the letter had anything to do with that turd Dantes from his old unit, who thought it would be really funny to mention the scars, thick as ropes, on his chest while he was reading, "My dear son...". From, "Somebody sure did a shit job of stitching you up," to when they finally sedate him, he loses track of time in the blessed red. They clear the blood off the walls easily, which makes him angry, like he doesn't even exist. No one else mentions his chest, or the little burn-thing that showed up one day on his cheek. The doctors don't know what it is, but they've seen the same on the bodies of the really fucked up ones, the ones that the Fed officially denies are still alive so they don't have to deal with the whole war crimes fiasco in addition to everything else, so he thinks maybe that's why they're keeping him here even when he's doing fine.

Three months in he starts convulsing and see hollow terrible creatures tasting of salt walk through the walls of the room and into people's eyes. After he manages to pull one out of an assistant, the security throws him into isolation for a week with too much of some pretty powerful anti-hallucinogens. After the week he's only convulsing and the same assistant, nervously adjusting his ill-fitting eye patch and staying ten feet away from him, says he's seen other patients do the same. He asks him if he were in, and winces at the word "intimate", contact with any Realians, infected or not, during "the incident". That's the Fed's official line on the – he sure as hell doesn't have the right word for it – Miltian operation. There's no news allowed in the ward, but he's heard doctors talking about "Gnosis", and "that monster Mizrahi", and the "Abyss".

The assistant asks him again, and he speaks for the first time in three months, fourteen days, twenty-one hours, and one minute.

"No," and his mouth tastes the word like ash.

--

No one has any idea what the hell happened in Miltia, himself included. He's too busy not thinking or tripping on something that no one's ever even heard of to begin to make coherent sense of anything. It gets really bad with the totally crazy ones who start ripping off each other's Realian-based prosthetics and gnawing the skin off to get to the tissue inside. Then the geniuses who run the place pinpoint what's been driving most of them crazy – apparently Realian tissue is the next recreational drug of choice. He wonders if the engineers who designed the content of the issue – called DME, though he has no idea what it stands for – knew what they were making. After the "incident", he doesn't think they had any idea at all.

The medics give them all a dose and the trips and shakes go away, replaced by a simple focused high that reminds him of his days on leave, back before all of this. The entire ward is silent for the first time in months as everyone lolls in a drugged euphoria, so the medics take the time to congratulation each other over the glazed eyes of the patients. He knows they do this because he can hear them through blasts of deafening psychotic release. He thinks sometimes that he knows how the old saints used to feel, stretched out over racks of ecstatic pleasure almost too great to bear. After the initial high's worn off, he can tell that everyone feels like he does, tired with a pleasant fatigue, like he's just been playing a game of ball with his friends.

But it only feels like that for a day, and when he wakes up from the first nightmare-free night in ages there's an itch in the back of his mind like he wants it again. The mark's gotten bigger on his face, and he sees the other patients' marks spread as well, like stigmata. The doctors want to see what makes it addictive, makes him crave it like an amino acid he never knew existed but still needs it bone-deep, under his skin.

But he leaves before they have a chance to test him. Since he's been talking, the doctors spend more time on the known cannibals and less time on one old soldier who's got a bad case of post-traumatic crazy going on. They offer him an honorable discharge but he sticks with it as a tactical specialist; the money's all right and the hours are long, which is basically all that he asks for. He stops by Fifth Jerusalem every once in a while on leave, and as the patch of hardened skin gets larger on his cheek he begins to see others like him with the same sort of camaraderie he imagines lepers had. Civilians, veterans, peacekeeping forces, all the same. Once, there was even a little girl who looked like that kid Shion, marred with a pattern that spread, petal-like, from neck to nose. He's still not sure if it was his mind or reality, because she was gone when he thought to look again and he's learned not to trust what he's seen, especially not after he learned why he should always carry a dose with him.

He follows them down alleys to slums no politician likes to talk about, especially not during re-election years, to get his fix – on the streets they call it Communion, if they're nice, and if not they call it Martyr-meat. It's not labeled, but he knows what it is and starts taking doses every month to start with, 250 g. As the Conflict – that's the official name now, "Conflict" – moves farther and farther away from the UMN news channels, he ups the dose and frequency – 300, 500, 1000 g.'s every week or so. His face is a mess, but he's able to think straight and he gets promoted to Lieutenant. Everyone looks studiously to anywhere but from his face when the obligatory handshakes are offered. He really doesn't care. He's busy and that's all that matters.

He hates when the Realian embargo is lifted, and he hates the Realians that come under his command. To make the days go by faster, he recites the self-destruct code that girl gave him like a mantra or confession. He thinks about using it, just for kicks, but that'd be a waste of taxpayer money and then they'd stop sending his mom the check. Using the "worried for you" tone like always, she still wants him to visit her. He still hasn't. He doesn't like to think about it, but he understands in the split second before sleep that the hatred and memories are all that's left of him, so he embraces it and terrorizes the Realians, just like they did to everyone else. They make the hating easy – just dumb servile obedience, nothing at all like –

So he wakes up and yells at people and keeps working and goes to bed like clockwork, hating them and everyone for forgetting it like a nightmare, and even in his worst trips on DME he never ever thinks about –

"Ah, how much in my mind was I disturbed, When I turned round to look on Beatrice, That her I could not see, although I was close at her side and in the Happy World!" –Purgatorio, Dante.

End

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